The present invention relates to the field of information management, and more specifically, to providing an information resource where the content is organized using a social graph.
Social networking has become an important part of how people interact with the world around them. It allows its users to connect to persons of interest in their lives, while updating them on new things happening to those persons. However, social networks are only as useful as the information that is in it. For example, if your friends are not on one social network, it may not be useful to you at all, even if it contains a wealth of other information.
So social networking sites work hard to increase their user base and make themselves useful to users who have joined. For example, some sites have begun allowing companies and other non-natural entities to join their sites. Much like their natural person counterparts, this allows users of the site to keep in touch with companies, charities, celebrities, and others they are interested in. Some other sites have also tried to make it as easy as possible to invite your friends and others to setup accounts with them, to lower the burden of getting your friends to join a new site.
However, these methods have limited usefulness. Many times, people just sign up for a social networking site, but do not actively participate in it. This increases the number of users for the site, but does not help in adding new material to it. This reduces the value of the site since, for example, having your friend on the same site as you is helpful but if they are not active on it, it isn't a useful way to stay up-to-date with what is happening with them. Furthermore, many people find it annoying to be asked to join a social networking site and few want to make and maintain multiple accounts across several social networking sites. Particularly for high net worth individuals, they may feel that these sites do not offer a good return on their time; after setting up a profile on the site, they find it limiting in the value they can get from it (e.g., business connections, business opportunities, and other benefits).
Therefore, there is a need to provide ways to allow users to find value in a social networking system, that do not have the drawbacks of other methods.